Archives For August 2014

I originally had other plans for Saturday, but they fell through. Left with a wide-open Saturday, I planned a multi-activation SOTA expedition. I even had my eyes on a few local inactivated mountains. However, my wife commented that I had been out of the house the last four Saturdays in a row and wasn’t too keen on me skipping town for a fifth Saturday. Knowing she’d let me go but I’d suffer for it later, I did the only thing I knew to get what I wanted: I invited her (and the baby) along.

Surprisingly, she agreed.

While I would still be able to do a SOTA activation, that meant that I had to be choosy about where we went which coincidentally also meant no new summits and it wouldn’t be a multi-activation kind of day. The weather-guessers were saying it was expected to be the hottest day of summer, so I wanted to be especially sensitive in regards to taking the baby along.

I decided upon the next-nearest summit, Kennesaw Mountain, as it has plenty of shade all the way to the top along a well-traveled path. Plus, I was very familiar with the hike and knew I could survive the trip with boy the radio AND baby strapped to my back. Using my Father’s Day gift, an Osprey Poco Plus, I carried a well-behaved 14 month old, all my radio gear and a baby to the top of Kennesaw Mountain. It wasn’t as difficult as I expected but took longer than I expected to lug what I estimated was approximately 40 pounds to the top.

Sarah entertained the kiddo while I began erecting my antenna. I’d never seen so much foot traffic at the top of any mountain I’ve ever been on, so not surprisingly I was getting all sorts of long stares and questions about what I was doing. As I was stretching out my cordage for the antenna and raising my carbon fiber mast, I had three separate individuals ask me where I was going to go fishing. To their credit, the mast IS a fishing pole.

All fishing jokes aside, the most common question I got was how far away was I able to talk to other stations. Today it just happened to be Arizona or Colorado, but the onlookers appeared quite impressed with that sort of distance. I was just happy to talk to anyone, it didn’t matter how far away they were. 🙂